


The Natural Sciences

by Anonymous



Series: The Natural Sciences [1]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M, New Zealand, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-05
Updated: 2009-06-06
Packaged: 2017-10-02 10:02:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Science: a way of understanding the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Magnetism

They didn't make sense. They were polar opposites, clear and simple. Dark and fair, English and American, young and old (well, not old, just old by the standards of our profession, when a decade is a century's worth of time and I should have been put in a museum as an artefact long ago), there was no reason they should've come together at all, not as resoundingly as they did, and certainly not with such a feeling of rightness to them. They didn't match, but they held together, and that's all I can say to explain it. Opposites attracting yet again, I suppose.

My house in Wellington had a light brown refrigerator with green handles, speckled with large discolored patches. The magnets I somehow managed to accumulate within weeks of moving in clashed horribly, because most of them were gay pride flags. The whole thing looked like some psychedelic guitar had smashed there and bits had clung, and to this day, I have a sneaking suspicion that Liv left the rainbow magnets there just to see if I'd throw them out.

(I never did; it was never worth the thought. One of the advantages of being old is that one's grasp on time is more flexible. New Zealand felt both more permanent and more temporary to me than to the rest of the cast, I think. A year-and-a-half at nineteen is a far smaller percentage of one's lifespan than it is at forty, and in one's sixties, well. One doesn't like to think of it. Rings would take up a far greater proportion of my life since the beginning of the shoot than it would anyone else's, but the life which had brought me here reminded me constantly that every frame and scene completed meant the shoot was drawing to a close.)

The refrigerator was an old one, which was fine, since I used it very little. The door, as most refrigerator doors are, was magnetic, and the age seemed to have increased that quality. The magnets stuck to it as if super-glued, and if I wanted to leave a shopping list or tack a picture up in the kitchen, it was often a struggle of several minutes' duration, an epic battle with a soundtrack of cursing, to get one off enough to stick the paper underneath.

Sometimes when I saw them together, I was inexplicably reminded of the magnets that had been so hard to remove from that hideous door. Ridiculous, of course. The plastic and metal clinging to my refrigerator had nothing in common with the bizarre way those two corresponded to each other. The way their bodies aligned had nothing to do with the compass needle that had gone berserk in the chopper flying to location. They were beautiful together, in a way that had nothing to do with anything outside themselves, only with love and opposition and attraction and a tension that sang with contentment.

The human heart is deceptively simple. Some vessels leading in, and some vessels leading out, and valves inside show the way through the passageways: deceptively simple. We're far more than flesh and blood, we're emotion, too, deeply attuned to the workings of our souls and far more fastened to the great and petty workings of this earth than we think.

Seismic changes underground produce strange results in babies worldwide. Six-fingered children and other such monsters roam the earth with microscopic explanation, and women curse the moon in time immemorial. Atoms smash, and we find ourselves adrift in a desert with creatures we do not recognize, who are nevertheless ourselves in a perverted mirror. We fall in love, and the earth's poles flip, even if only for us.

Opposition doesn't always mean disagreement; it can be equilibrium just as well. You can't have a north pole without a south. You fall in love with someone else, someone _different_, and with any luck, you'll find your own south pole in opposition to the other's north.


	2. Gravity

Beginnings are always funny. But I swear they never started, they just were. Viggo came late to production, everyone knows that story, about Stuart, poor bloke, getting fired, and Viggo flying halfway across the world to play a part his son convinced him to take on a day's notice, and Orlando'd been there since the training began, a shy, brash kid fresh out of school, and we all just knew without knowing. You know how that is sometimes. There are just those things you know, and you don't know that you know 'em. That's how it was. Like how you know that when you drop something, it'll fall. No one ever told you, that's just the way things are.

I asked Viggo once, how they started, and he just blew out smoke, as if he, and not Ian, was Gandalf, and said, "You know Newton?"

"Someone in production? That's how it started?"

"Nuh-uh. English. Sir Isaac. The apple guy," he said, eyes half-closed so I couldn't tell if he was making it up. But at least now I did know what he meant.

"Yeah, some," I told him. Hated science in school, but I remembered my physics lessons pretty well. Daydreamed about pushing some bastard off the school, 9.8 meters per second, acceleration acting on him, faster and faster, and now I don't even remember his name. Jesus, what growing up does to you. Memory's a sieve even for lines nowadays. "A body in motion will continue in motion unless and until an outside force acts upon it, that kind of thing. What's that got to do with you and the elf?"

He shrugged. "Just seemed to fit, but I guess not. I've had the idea that we're demonstrating Newton, but not sure how. Failed physics in high school, managed to avoid it in college. Don't really remember anything."

Viggo played dumb sometimes, used that farm boy smile and the slow rasp of his voice to fool people into showing more than they thought they'd reveal to him. Couldn't tell if he was doing it to me. Didn't matter. It wasn't really important, I was just curious if even they knew.

After my death scene, I went back to England. Lorna was writing a composition about newts, apparently in second year now, they raise newts, Christ alone knows why. And she left her kids' encyclopaedia open to the page on the kitchen table. When she went to school, and then back to her mother's for the week, I was about to put it away when I noticed the next entry on the page. _Newton_.

> The force of gravity between objects arises from the attraction between the particles of matter that make up the objects.  
> 

I'm still not sure what that means, in physics terms. But at least now I know what Viggo meant about the latest demonstration of Newton. Gravity brought them together—sounds like some tagline from a seventies sci-fi flick. And somehow true, too.


	3. Astronomy

The constellations in New Zealand were—it sounds so stupid to say it—so different from the ones at home. It was really like being in Middle Earth, with even the simplest and oldest of landmarks gone. Maybe that's why I saw it.

I'm not an observant girl, normally. Not exactly self-centered, at least I hope not, but I just don't see people in detail. I miss things, don't pick up visual cues right, react a split second too late. I'm better with sounds, most musician's kids are. I grew up with guitars in my life, not paintings, what can I say?

But down under, I swear I saw everything. I swear I saw it even before they did. They were just in such clear focus, no ambiguity about them. They were what they were, and they glittered in the middle of the mutability of the rest of us: PJ had his constant focus on the movies, and I could never tell if he ever saw anything beyond the lens, and then I saw him kiss Fran one day, and my sense of him shifted equilibrium.

They were like stars, individually beautiful, and together, forming pictures that held stories within them. Viggo carried his sword around and didn't bother cutting his hair or shaving, but his eyes were like a Russian husky's, one howling at the moon with a searing longing. Orlando—well, Orlando. Orlando was frightening, even with those hideous shirts and the Mohawk, a Buddy Holly chord, bizarre and stunning, with such honesty to him.

The music of the spheres, I thought once, and shivered.

Once, when I was a kid, I went to the Arctic for two weeks, and while I was there, I got my first glimpse of the Northern lights. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, and when Viggo started talking about them one night, I knew he was thinking of Orlando. I could see Orlando stretched across the sky in ever-warping lashings of color, always so clear and complexly gorgeous.

Orlando drove me home one night, and told me the stories of the constellations he said Viggo'd told him from night shoots, things he remembered from Argentina, and I listened to him talk about huge gas balls that look so different to us than the all-consuming flames they really are, and almost laughed, almost asked if he'd ever looked in a mirror. When a star burns out, it has to burn out all the way, destroying everything it is, and I started to worry about him that night.

Stars—such a stupid metaphor for us. We're not stars. We're actors. Those two are stars, and not because of how they dominate a movie set or the publicity afterwards, but because of the way they are. They illuminate everything around them. They make constellations of each other, just by being. I didn't know any local arrangements of the stars overhead, but I saw theirs, and recognized it.


	4. Waves

Fuckin' Sblomie. It was him who said we should get Viggo to go surfing, that time. It's always "the hobbits" who get blamed, but most of the crazy stuff we do, all right, half, maybe, it's all him. Most of it. Most of the time.

That scene where Viggo's only got one side of his face showing, totally Dom's fault.

We woke him up at the ass-end of dawn, so's we could get out to the beach before anyone else. Well, we would have woken him up, if he hadn't been up already. Didn't even seem surprised to see us, but then he never was surprised about anything. Almost anything. Almost never.

He had something white in his hair, and we all just figured it was paint. Orlando yelled 'filthy human' out the back seat, gesturing to his Mohawk, and Viggo blinked, and held a finger to his lips. Well, not really to his lips, more like he just rested it against his lower lip and opened his mouth a little, but we all got the message anyway, to shut the hell up and not wake his neighbors. Orlando flushed, and even his scalp was red.

The sun was the same color as Orlando's cheeks when we pulled into the parking lot and started dragging our boards out of the trunk and where we'd jammed them into the rack on top of Dom's car.

The wave, when it came, didn't even seem that big at first, but I guess it was. It sucked him under really fast, before any of us even realized what was happening. He just—fuckin' Sblomie, was all I could think, as it curled up and he just went down instead of riding it all the way out.

He always went under, just sliding into Aragorn's skin and just immersing himself in weapons training, four, five, six hours a day, just reading the whole script in three nights, just plunging into Tolkien's text and rewriting Phillippa's and Fran's lines and just arguing about it.

He just fell into the wave, and didn't come out for a really long time. Only a couple of seconds, I guess, but long enough for me to think _fuckin' Sblomie, we killed the king,_ and then they were all paddling over and yanking him out. I was too far away, but I didn't even think to go for the first-aid kit, that's why the bruise was so bad. I felt awful about that.

Viggo's a good actor, but he doesn't know shit about surfing. That's the thing. The way he acts is to drown in the character, in what the character wants, and in surfing, you have to not give in. A wave works because it's the energy you're riding, the actual water doesn't move that much at all, and Viggo just goes for the substance instead. Ignored the energy and got hit by the actual, like, water.

Orlando pulled him out, nearly going under himself, but got him onto dry land. They were both gasping for breath, Viggo's a heavy bastard, and I guess Orlando had to carry him, and the waves were pretty strong, that's what makes that stretch of beach so great.

It was Sblomie's fault the other time, too; we never got him to go surfing again, Pete threatened us all with disembowelment with a rusty spoon if we ever suggested it, but there was this one time that's a story we don't talk about. Not in publicity, anyway.


	5. Geology

Hawaii, man, can you believe it? I'm in fuckin' Hawaii, shooting a fuckin' TV series, surfing practically every day, with all these flowers everywhere, and volcanoes, man, real volcanoes. Okay, so when I first came, I was a little worried about, you know, the ground exploding under me, but was I gonna turn down Hawaii? Course not.

So I'm getting used to the place an' all, it's like America except not, because, hello, Hawaii! Fuck, I sound like such a twit, and I go out to see the volcanoes on the other side of Oahu. There's a day off, or it's Evangeline's backstory day, something, I don't really remember. It's actually not that impressive, to tell ya the truth. Some smoke and lots of rock, and it's all pretty boring. But there was a gift shop, because lots of visitors come there, I guess, because, yeah, Hawaii—I'm still stoked over that, you know.

They have little necklaces with chips of hardened lava set in them, which is really just rock. I'm thinking of picking a couple up for some mates—Orlando'd love one, even if it's not his keepsake, his memory, he cares about what we have in our lives, and all. And I start thinking about the rock. Because, you know, that's not just any rock.

That's rock that just wasn't there before. It's brand-new rock.

You'd think rock's about the one thing you can count on. That rock doesn't change. But this—this is new fuckin' rock.

I buy a few necklaces and some candy for Bills, the man's got a worse sweet tooth than me mum, and head back to the flat I'm in for now. And I lie on the bed, eating Bills's sweets, and tossing the necklace up into the air. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that rock changes.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. I mean, everything has a beginning, right? It's just that stone, rock, whatever, it's always been there. I've got lines, rewrites, I should be learning, there's always rewrites, but I decide to flip through the brochures from today instead. They talk about the shape of the volcano, the plants that thrive in that kind of soil (there was soil there? I missed that) (how the fuck do you say these names, they're all vowels, the a'e fern, sounds like All Hallow's), and they talk about how the lava is really just melted rock and when it gets exposed to cooler air outside, it hardens. Seems mostly like the new rock gets formed in one way. Gross oversimplification, but I've got it. I've fuckin' got it.

Heat and pressure. Enough heat and enough pressure, and you can melt rock and turn it into lava, you can turn limestone into marble, you can do anything you fuckin' want. Well. Not you. I could, though. 'Cause I'm in fuckin' Hawaii and there are no more limits, man.

I look at that necklace twisted round my finger, and whirl it a bit. Heat and pressure, man, I'll have to tell Orlando about that, I think, when I send the necklace to him wherever the hell he's filming now, and I hit myself in the cheek with the pendant. Heat and pressure.

That's why he changed. He came to New Zealand a kid, a smart kid, but a kid, and he left different. We all left different, but he was just more than he had been when he came. It wasn't just the tattoo, it wasn't just the Mohawk, it wasn't just anything. Heat and pressure, I thought dumbly.

The heat between him and Viggo—look, it's not like you didn't know, not like anyone couldn't know—was scary. They smoked when they touched. When they fuckin' looked at each other, and you'da gotten crushed if you stood between them, I swear. No force on earth could've kept those two apart.

He came to New Zealand limestone and he left marble. Heat and pressure, man. Heat and pressure, and Orlando wears that necklace, right along the copper ring that Vigs gave him. He says makeup artist, he's lying, 'less he means that Viggo remade him as marble, just ready to be carved by the mad artist.


	6. Biochemistry

"Whatcha thinking about?" he asked once, when in the warmth of New Zealand's December, we were lying in the backyard, on a rare day off we had together, after lunch. The hairs on his arms tickled the side of my face, but warm and sated with aubergine and white wine and kisses, I didn't move. The tickle was worth it for the scent of his skin and the grass.

"Chemistry," I told him.

"Chemistry?" That was the nice thing about him. One of the many. Along with, you know, the amazing kisses, and the inventive, wicked mind, and the propensity for truly twisted pranks, and the bizarre skill for cooking vegetarian Italian food, and the talent for knowing when to shut up, and the knack for slipping into character in a single breath, and the ability to smile in that certain way that made me just want to pull him into a dark corner and do nearly-unspeakable things to him, and the flair to get away with damn near anything he wanted.

He also just let you be. He wanted to understand, but never pushed. If you couldn't give him as much as he wanted, he'd never force you. At least, he never forced me. I sometimes wish he had. I wish he'd held onto me a little tighter, hadn't just let me go. Because I don't know how to find my way back to him. He would know, but I can't ask him.

Anyway, that one time, I said, "Yeah. Biochemistry. Like erections. You know that club drug, amyl nitrate, yeah? And the new one? Ecstasy, that's what it's called. They work on the same chemicals in the brain that stimulates erections. But the thing is, it's mostly mental. Like, if you take the drug, and you're not already slightly aroused, it won't work the same way. Or, you know, I could do this, and the reaction's somewhere else on your body."

"Oh, fuck," he whispered, a slight shudder going through him.

"You're a drug, man," I said then, and he is, you know, addictive as all hell, permanently altered the way my brain works, changed the circuits, the neurotransmitters, and I tipped over on top of him, and pressed my hips against his, and he moaned a little and lifted his chin, with its stubble that was so perfect on the insides of my thighs, and god, it was a better rush than any club ever was, no matter how many damn strobe lights and pretty people there were.

I've got no capacity for alcohol, not like Johnny's or Bernard's, so I never tried drugs, couldn't risk the aftereffects—hangovers hit me hard enough, especially when I was in school—but no drug could ever have equaled his effect on me, and the morning after him was worse than any kind of chemical withdrawal could've been. I didn't know just how right I was then, just how good I had it, and all I thought about was the slickness of his teeth under my tongue, and the way my fingers aligned along his ribs, and how we balanced together in the grass, my knees turning green, and his hand moving just where it should have been, and—god, but ohgod_fuck_, that's the way into my heart, you, _oh, jesus_.

When shadows began to further cool the sweat on our bodies, and our skins were sticky with viscous fluid, he breathed a long, slow sigh, placed his lips against my ear, and said very softly, "And what's everyone say we have?"

"Chemistry," I whispered back, like a secret. "Of course."

But chemistry is the science of explosions, and biochemistry's all about reactions. Our chemistry on celluloid might've been exciting, but biochemistry's all too human to be stable.


End file.
